Friday, July 18, 2008

Pure Poetry

Poetry has no other aim or object but herself....Truth has nothing to do with Song.... With these words, Baudelaire cut himself and poetry loose from a couple thousand years of literary tradition. I don't know if he got this idea from Poe or if he or Poe got it from someone else. Schopenhauer had said something similar about music but it is unlikely that either of them could have had a chance to read The World as Will And Idea which though published in 1819 would not become widely known until the the late 1850s or sixties.

Pure poetry is not easy to write. Henceforth this would be the ideal that ambitious poets would increasingly try to approximate. Rimbaud for example. Literary critics did not much like this idea, if they paid it any attention at all, for it didn't give them much to talk about. But it had important consequences for some critics in the 20th century who took it to mean that if you want to understand what a poem is actually doing, you had to try to understand it on its own terms. You had to try to get inside it, so to speak.

How 'pure' is Baudelaire's own poetry? This is a question that I am not qualified to answer since I don't read French very well.

Here, in Richard Howard's translation, is the poem that T.S. Eliot was 'imitating' in Preludes:

TWILIGHT: EVENING

It comes as an accomplice, stealthily,the lovely hour that is the felon's friend;the sky, like curtains round a bed, draws close,and man prepares to become a beast of prey.

Longed for by those whose aching arms confess:we earned our daily bread, at last it comes,evening and the anodyne it bringsto workmen free to sleep and dream of sleep,to stubborn scholars puzzling over texts,to minds consumed by one tormenting pain. . .Meantime, foul demons in the atmospheredutifully waken--they have work to do--rattling shutters as they take the sky.Under gaslamps shaken by the windwhoredom invades and everywhere at oncedebouches on invisible thoroughfaresas if the enemy had launched a raid;it fidgets like a worm in the city's filth,filching its portion of Man's daily bread.

Listen! Now you can hear the kitchens hiss,the stages yelp, the music drown it all!The dens that specialize in gambling fillwith trollops and their vague confederates,and thieves untroubled by a second thoughtwill soon be hard at work (they also serve)softly forcing doors and secret drawersto dress their sluts and live a few days more.

This is the hour to compose yourself, my soul;ignore the noise they make; avert your eyes.Now comes the time when invalids grow worseand darkness takes them by the throat; they endtheir fate in the usual way, and all their sighsturn hospitals into a cave of winds.More than one will not come back for brothwarmed at the fireside by devoted hands.

Most of them, in fact, have never knowna hearth to come to, and have never lived.

I (very briefly) discussed Eliot's poem, Preludes on 3-11-08. I'll show you that poem as soon as I can locate it. Ah, here it is:

THE WINTER evening settles downWith smell of steaks in passageways.Six o’clock.The burnt-out ends of smoky days.And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scrapsOf withered leaves about your feetAnd newspapers from vacant lots;The showers beatOn broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the streetA lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousnessOf faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled streetWith all its muddy feet that pressTo early coffee-stands.With the other masqueradesThat time resumes, One thinks of all the handsThat are raising dingy shadesIn a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealingThe thousand sordid imagesOf which your soul was constituted;They flickered against the ceiling.And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shuttersAnd you heard the sparrows in the gutters,You had such a vision of the streetAs the street hardly understands;Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair,Or clasped the yellow soles of feetIn the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skiesThat fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feetAt four and five and six o’clock;And short square fingers stuffing pipes,And evening newspapers, and eyesAssured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened streetImpatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curledAround these images, and cling:The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

About Me

I'm a scholar by profession who learned, too late, that the world really does not need another paltry book about Shakespeare. What else is there to say? Except, as another, much greater scholar once said, "Sir, my history will not be long: the life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away and is very little diversified by events. To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself."
I was educated at Amherst College (1949-53) where I studied philosophy, mathematics, and literature, and at Harvard University where I earned a Ph.D in English Literature in 1964. I studied at Cambridge University on a Fulbright (1954-55), served in the U.S. Army (1955-57), taught (from 1962 to 1999, when I retired) at Wellesley College, Bemidji State University, Metropolitan State University, Hebei University (PRC). I have been married, happily, to Katherine Greene Lewis since 1960. We have four children.